The second dogma that may give us trouble is the belief thatconsciousness is always homogeneous, that it has only one way ofgrasping the given.
When we hear the last note of a melody all the previous notes are still present, yet neither as actually present sounding notes, which would mean cacophony, nor as actually present recollections of notes, in which case we'd be hearing only one chord, not a melody.
Punctualists must say that a note is either present or absent to consciousness; they have no rooms for different modes of presence and absence.
The error is to think of consciousness as analogous to a searchlight which shines indifferently on people, buildings, submarines and stars.
In this analogy, only the objects change; the searchlight of consciousness is forever the same.
Husserl claims that when we drop our dogmas and look at consciousness as we find it, we discover that it acts in many different ways, in different modes.
Imagine then instead an observation station that had a searchlight, a radar, a sonar detector and a radio telescope. We couldn't observe stars with a searchlight, nor submerged objects with a radar.
Similarly although consciousness has a privileged mode of operation by which it experiences the now, it also has another mode in which it grasps the past, and not by treating it as a now.
The difference between the current note and the past note is not like that between people and buildings, but more like the difference between a sonar echo and a radio telescope image.
It is the articulation of these various modes of givenness which makes up the essential structure of the experience of internal time consciousness.